Finding the Best Fares to Europe

By

Scott McCartney

June 27, 2012 6:41 p.m. ET

Conventional travel wisdom says the earlier you book, the lower the price on international trips.

Thinking of going to the Olympics in London, or Paris in the fall or Sydney in December? Scott McCartney on Lunch Break looks at when is the best time to buy international tickets. Photo: Getty Images.

Wrong. The best time to buy is about two or three months before departure, according to studies of airline-fare trends. Any earlier, you may end up paying hundreds of dollars more for the same coach seat as someone who books later. Waiting until too close to departure can be costly, too, because fares usually go up.

"Fares start out real high and then drop. The sweet spot looks like it is about two months prior" to travel, says
Bob Harrell,
a consultant who tracks airfares and studied about 100 international markets over the past nine months for The Wall Street Journal.

Choosing when to buy a ticket is one of the most vexing decisions for travelers. Airlines bounce fares up and down regularly, sometimes several times in the same day. Sales come and go quickly, and availability of cheap seats on prime flights can be scarce. Travelers who wait for a better price can end up disappointed when prices keep rising. Travelers who jump on a fare at first search may end up angry if the price drops.

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With domestic trips, sales are typically launched on Monday nights and the cheapest prices can often be found on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (Most leisure travelers shop on the weekends, however, when prices may be higher.) FareCompare, a travel-planning website, found 68% of domestic sales are filed Monday night, and typically last one to three days.

Fare analysts say airlines test demand route by route, starting international prices high and then offering some seats at low prices, for example, four or five months before departure. If particular flights fill up quicker than in past years, prices get pushed back up. If sales are slow against historical patterns, prices may drop further—but often not until two or three months before departure. That is when airlines start getting serious about unsold seats on international trips.

International sales are seasonal, not weekly, fare experts say, and often route-by-route rather than global.

"They may have a French sale or have a Houston sale," says Mr. Seaney.

Airlines often launch sales for fall travel about the end of July or early August. The cheapest prices of the year are for travel in February, fare experts say. Those deals usually show up in November and early December.

One example Wednesday: British Airways began offering $2,012 round-trip business-class tickets to London for travel between July 16 and Sept 2. These fares typically range from $5,000 to more than $10,000. Business-class tickets often sell slowly in the summer, and the Olympics may be discouraging business trips.

As with domestic tickets, traveling internationally midweek on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday is typically less expensive than weekend travel.

For every route, airlines load a dozen or more different fares into reservation systems and then pick which one applies to a specific flight at a specific time, usually based on how well that flight is selling and what the airline expects in demand for seats, including demand from business travelers who book later.

Mr. Harrell studied fares for peak travel periods—summertime—and found the lowest price loaded into reservation systems starts high and comes down for several months before moving higher closer to departure. Comparing 100 different routes to Europe, the highest prices were in October for peak-period travel, on average, so buying that early for summer would have been a mistake.

The cheapest time to buy that peak-period fare: April.

How do you know if you've found a good fare? Check prices often, if you can, and write down the lowest fare offered. Having that historical information will help you evaluate when a price is worth grabbing. The travel-booking section at Microsoft Corp.'s Bing.com offers several months of historical prices on select routes. If that is available for your itinerary, it is a huge help: You can see from the chart whether the current price is high or low compared with past prices.

After early expectations of big price increases this summer, fares moderated and appear to have ended up only modestly higher than last year.

As economic turmoil roiled Europe and the U.S. economy slowed, demand for long international trips on both sides of the Atlantic weakened, travel sellers say. Many vacationers seem to be opting to stay closer to home, reining in spending on summer vacations.

International fares for the July Fourth travel period were up just 1.3% to an average $899 from $888 in 2011 at Travelocity, the online travel agency run by Sabre Holdings Corp. Two years ago, Travelocity's average fare for international destinations, including the Caribbean, Mexico and Canada as well as Europe, Asia and South America, was $804.

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Fares to London, host city of the Summer Olympics, have followed the trend, rather than spiking higher with increased demand, Travelocity says. Airlines added capacity into London to accommodate athletes, coaches, officials and spectators. High prices early on, plus warnings of huge crowds, may have scared away some visitors. Travelocity says its average fare for London this summer was $1,226, up 2% from $1,197 last year. By contrast, fares to Cancun, Mexico, are 15% higher than last year.

After "very, very strong demand throughout the early part of the year leading into May, we've seen demand begin to flatten out," says Travelocity Vice President
Simon Bramley.

Still, high fuel prices have erased many of the cheap off-peak prices travelers used to enjoy. Mr. Seaney notes that airlines have built an average fuel surcharge of $450 round-trip into their international prices, and taxes and government fees can hit $200 or more on some routes. In the U.S., airlines have to display the total price, so travelers don't really see the structural underpinnings of the fare. And while the fuel surcharge is basically just part of the fare, even charging $200 on top of that for flights across oceans means tickets start around $1,000.

"It's really changed the dynamic for fall and wintertime fares, where you had prices in the $500s and $600s historically," he says.

Mr. Seaney says he likes to go to Germany in the fall for Oktoberfest, typically paying about $700 round-trip. This year, he's expecting to pay more.

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